


If You'll Stay

by StaringAtTheTwinSuns



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death (mentioned), Crack Relationships, Crack Treated Seriously, Force-Sensitive Finn, Jedi Luke Skywalker, M/M, The Force, Time Travel, not really - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2019-05-20 13:26:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14895438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StaringAtTheTwinSuns/pseuds/StaringAtTheTwinSuns
Summary: Finn knows he's supposed to find someone named Luke... but he doesn't expect to find him on a nearly-deserted world, and he REALLY doesn't expect him to be a young, insecure Jedi who desperately needs someone to understand the loneliness he feels. Their relationship blossoms as Luke teaches Finn to use the Force, but the world they've created out of time won't last forever--and when they both return to their respective timelines, the distance it puts between them will push their love to the breaking point, even as the future of the galaxy hangs in the balance.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work in progress. Tags will be added as new chapters are posted. Rating MAY change too, but will not be explicit. :)

Finn is floating. Falling. Flying. And when he wakes, he is on his back, staring up at a foreign sky.

There are names on his lips— _ Rey _ , said with kindness.  _ Ren _ , said with something that burns. But the faces that go with them, if they ever existed, slip through his mind’s grasp like the filmy wisp of clouds that trail through the too-blue sky overhead.

Finn sits up. It surprises him, for some reason he can’t quite name, that he can do that. It seems it ought to hurt, at least, when he does.

“Hello?” he calls. “Is anyone here?”

It doesn’t surprise him when no one replies.

Finn isn’t hungry, or thirsty, or tired, and the clothes he’s wearing are plain and functional, but clean and whole. This, too, seems at odds with something he can't quite remember. He should be glad to be comfortable. Healthy. Alive. But instead it feels like, in order to be here, he has left something important undone.

Wherever he has ended up, it's perfect—too perfect, a storybook caricature of a world. He stands on soft grass, by a clear, siltless river, under the flawless blue sky. And the air is so still, so devoid of heat or cold, that it might as well have been pumped through the reclamation system of a Star Destroyer.

A Star Destroyer. He remembers that, then. He was a stormtrooper. FN-2187. Now he is Finn, and there are other names in there:  _ Phasma. Hux. Solo. _ A sadness.  _ Solo _ brings with it a sadness, that sweeps away like the river water as soon as it comes.

None of those people, whoever they are, are here. But there is life—the shadows of birds in the sky, the splash of a jumping fish in the river. There might be sentient beings here, too.

Finn starts to walk. He has done this, too, recently—one foot before the other, not sure where he is going. Not sure what he is seeking, or what he will find.

He knows it when he finds it, though—the only building, the only sign of human intervention on this world. A house, on the top of a hill. Familiar, in the way that all the names in his head are familiar. He doesn’t remember it. But Finn still knows: it’s his. There’s something about it—the long, thin windows, the silver-grey sheen of the walls. It feels like home. Like a home he’s had and somehow forgotten, even before the door opens automatically to allow him inside.

“Hello? Is anyone here?” But Finn knows there isn't. He walks through the house: A living area, small but clean, a table full of holos with the faces out of focus, and Finn wonders if the people in them are  _ Rey _ and  _ Ren  _ and the others, or someone else. Someone lost too far back in the clouds to even have a name. There’s a kitchen, full of plates and utensils, but when Finn opens the cabinets the only food in them is packs of emergency rations. This strikes him as odd; this kitchen should have real food. But when he tries to think what “real food” is, his mind goes as fuzzy as the holos.

There are bedrooms upstairs. Two of them, somehow, even though there is only one of him. And even though Finn isn’t tired—he doesn’t know if he  _ can _ be tired in this place—he crawls into one of the beds and pulls the covers up to his chin.

It’s a child’s bed. And Finn doesn’t remember being small enough to actually fit. But he does fit, somehow, and it  _ smells _ like home and belonging. Strange and distant words. And yet it feels like they, too, are more within his reach than they should be. Like he might find one, or maybe both of them here. Finn isn’t sleepy—it feels like he’s just woken up—but he closes his eyes and tries to breathe in the memory of this place. There is something here. Something, or someone, he is trying to find, but he can’t remember who or what it is.

The room, and the house, and the world around him are silent in a way that feels unreal. He doesn’t know if he’s ever been in a place so silent, where he has to rustle the blanket up against his face to make sure his ears are still working. The birds don’t cry, and the river has stopped burbling or is simply too far away now. Still, Finn  _ listens _ , and after a minute or an hour or a day, he finally hears.

It starts as a distant whine, something overhead and far away. And the closer it gets, the more it builds up to a scream, the more it pushes at the foggy spaces in Finn’s memory. It’s the sound of an engine.

Finn already knows what he will see, before he throws off the blanket and runs to the window. He is still surprised, though, at the shape of the fighter.  _ Enemy fighter _ , his brain supplies, although something tells him this isn’t an enemy, even if it isn’t necessarily a friend. There is something off about this fighter, something otherworldly. Nostalgic, even though the ship itself doesn’t seem old.

He should be afraid.

His heart is beating faster, but it's not the fear he knows it should be.

Finn doesn’t know why the ship is here, or even where  _ here _ is. He knows that he was a stormtrooper, and that this ship belongs to the Resistance. But there’s something different about it. Something different from…  _ another ship. Where?  _ His memories tell him he shouldn’t trust the pilot, but those same memories war with something else—a gut feeling, for lack of a better term—that tells him this ship means something, is part of the  _ something _ that Finn came here to find.

He rushes out into the yard, and raises a hand to shield his eyes from the sun glinting off the X-wing’s hull.  _ X-wing _ . The ship has a name, then, and it’s a name that brings a faded fear, and a stronger sense of safety, of security. The cockpit starts to open, the glare on the window so bright that Finn can’t make out the pilot’s face, and another name rises to his lips without thought: “Poe?”

The pilot isn’t Poe. Finn doesn’t remember exactly who Poe is, but he knows that this pilot isn't him. He doesn’t move like Poe; he doesn’t dress like Poe. He isn’t dressed like a pilot at all. X-wing pilots wear bright orange, but this man is dressed in black. He’s slim, and no taller than Finn, but there’s something about the way he carries himself: hand-over-hand down the ladder and foot in front of purposeful foot across the hill. There is a self-confidence about him that Finn envies. This man knows who he is, he thinks; he knows his place in the world.

And then he stops, and looks from Finn to the house. And in a voice too young and far too uncertain for someone who holds himself the way he does, the pilot who might not be a pilot says, “What is this place? Who are you?”

“Finn.” He is sure of that, at least, and he holds out his hand to greet the visitor.

The pilot looks from Finn’s face to his hand, and takes it, shakes it softly and slowly. He wears one glove, and on glove only. It seems a strange fashion choice. But nothing about this man, Finn thinks, is for show.

“It’s nice to meet you, Finn,” the pilot says, cautiously. Like he’s here looking for something, too. “I’m Luke.”

_ Luke. _

_ Luke! _

That’s another name Finn knows. It feels different, though, not like  _ Rey  _ or  _ Poe _ or even the strange, sad  _ Solo. _ He has met those people. He knows their faces, even though they’re hidden in the cloud of his memories. Finn doesn’t know this man.

But his name is somehow  _ Luke _ . And  _ Luke _ is someone.

“Luke.” Finn repeats the name. “I think I’m supposed to find you.”

Luke nods. He can’t be much older than Finn, but a thoughtful frown lines his face, and a shadow ages his bright blue eyes. “I think you’re right,” he says—half a statement, half a question. “I’ve been looking for you, too.”

Finn follows his gaze, back up to the house. “Do you know what this place is?”

"I have a guess. I was hoping you'd be able to tell me."

Luke nods to the house; it's a question.

"We can go up there if you want. But it's empty," Finn explains. "I don't know what you think you're going to find."

They walk together, Finn and Luke.  _ Luke _ . The name still resonates, as something important, but Finn can't remember where he's heard it, or why.

"Do you know this place?" Luke asks. "This house. Is it something you've seen before?"

"No," Finn says, but that's just a trained reaction, drilled into him through years with the First Order.  _ Yes sir. No sir. I didn't see anything. _ But he does know this house--or something like it, at least. "Maybe," he corrects himself. He doesn't know why he's saying this to a stranger, even a stranger with a too-familiar name. But he's saying it to himself, more than anything else. "I think I lived here as a kid."

Luke stops, in front of the door that opened so easily for Finn earlier, and gives Finn another searching look, like he’s trying to see what’s behind his eyes. It ought to make Finn uncomfortable. He doesn’t remember being a kid, and the bits and pieces he does remember have been pushed under the surface for years, like buried treasure, safe from whatever the First Order could do to tarnish them. It should feel wrong to share them now, with this stranger with the familiar name and the too-old eyes.

He does remember the house. It wasn’t  _ here _ , not in a place like this, and parts of it feel incomplete and bare. But the holos. The bed. The long, thin windows that the other worlds Finn’s been to didn’t have.

“I was a stormtrooper,” he says. “They took me from my family when I was a baby. I think this is what I remember, from before then.”

“Do you know how you got here?” Luke asks, and Finn shakes his head. He doesn’t remember enough of what happened. There was a fight. Something hit him. And when he woke up…

“Am I dead?”

“I don’t think so.” But the confidence with which Luke held himself earlier is gone. “You feel alive to me. In the Force.”

That’s definitely a question. “The Force,” Finn repeats his words, as the door slides open again. “That sounds… familiar. But I don’t know from where.”

“You’re not a Jedi, then.” There's a note of disappointment in Luke's voice.

"No." Finn stops, his footsteps stilled by the click of  _ something _ falling into place in his brain. "You are."

That's not a question. He knows this. He is looking for Luke, and Luke is a Jedi, and  _ this _ Luke, with his young smile and old eyes, doesn't really fit the now-forgotten image in his head.

"That's right," Luke says. He takes a holo from the table. The blurry face has clarified into that of a middle-aged woman Finn has never seen before. A shadow flits across Luke's face, but he puts the holo down with a distant smile. "It still feels strange to say that. I'm a Jedi. But I haven't been a Jedi for very long. I'm looking for others." He takes a step forward, trailing his ungloved hand along the wall, which seems somehow browner and earthier and rounder around the edges than it was before. "Others," Luke says, "who know how to use the Force."

And then he turns, and looks Finn straight in the eye. "Or those who have the potential to learn."

Finn shakes his head. He's not a Jedi. He's a stormtrooper. He  _ was _ a stormtrooper. It's about the only thing he knows for sure. "I don't have that potential." He shakes his head, but Luke stops him with a hand on his shoulder.

"I think you do." There's a kindness in his eyes, a patience that reminds Finn of... someone. One of the faces that's faded into grey. "How else could I have felt you, across..." Luke trails off. "A long distance. I'm not sure how much. But I felt you anyway." He let his hand fall to his side, and lowers his gaze to the floor. "I need you," he admits. "I need someone like you. It's been too hard, trying to do this on my own."

"You're not on your own." Finn's not really sure why he says it, but it feels like another thing he  _ knows _ . There are people on the side of good.

"So you'll come with me, then? You'll train with the Force?" And for all his calm demeanor, in that moment, Luke sounds like an excited kid.

A smile warms Finn's face. "I'm not sure I  _ can  _ come with you. I'm not sure how I got here in the first place. And your ship doesn't look big enough for two. I don't remember much, but I know I was looking for you. If you can teach me something, anything, I think I ought to learn it. I'll do what you want me to do. If you'll stay."

"Stay here?" Luke looks around the house, and his voice is colored with a disbelief that Finn doesn't completely understand. "I don't think I can. Not forever. But I'll teach you, and we'll figure out how to get you out of here. I have to be honest with you, Finn." He grips Finn's shoulder again, and something warm and comforting runs through Finn's body. "I'm not entirely sure what it is, but I feel it too.  There's something important you have to do."


	2. Chapter 2

This isn’t what Luke was expecting.

Finn isn’t what Luke was expecting, for one thing. It’s an unfair assumption, and Luke feels a little guilty for having it, but when he’d first talked to Leia about training new Jedi, he’d somehow imagined they'd be kids. And then, when he’d felt Finn’s presence, bright enough to send ripples through the Force all the way from… wherever this was, Luke had almost dared to hope that, whoever he had found, they were already trained somehow in the Force, if not necessarily as a Jedi.

Finn is none of the above. He is Luke’s age, more or less, and both unpolished in the Force and blindingly strong. He reminds Luke of Leia, in that sense at least—all that potential, boiling under the surface.  Waiting to be tapped, at least if Finn wants to tap into it the way Leia seems reluctant to try.

And it’s almost a relief, that instead of a child or a master, the first potential Jedi Luke’s managed to find is more an equal. A possible friend.

A former stormtrooper. That’s unexpected, too, and there’s a grief in Finn’s eyes when he says it. Luke wishes he could make him believe it doesn't matter, but while he knows from experience that shame at where you come from can grow and turn to pride, he also knows that it takes time. What concerns Luke at the moment isn’t  _ who _ Finn is, but  _ how  _ and  _ where. _

“You said you were looking for me,” Luke says. “Do you remember why? And since when?” He isn’t sure why, but he isn't ready to talk yet about his own visions. He’s been looking for Finn for weeks—months, now. Since only a few weeks after Endor. And Luke’s not exactly sure what he did differently, how he succeeded in finding Finn now.

Finn closes his eyes, and the effort of thought, of memory, is visible on his face. “No,” he says, after a prolonged moment. “It had something to do with the Force, though. The Jedi.”

“Darth Vader?” It’s a possibility Luke has to address: that Finn might not have been looking for Luke for his own sake, but on orders from someone in the Empire.

“I don’t think so.” Finn furrows his brow, and frowns, still fighting whatever block is on his memories. “I’ve heard that name, though. There was someone. A mask?” And then, without warning, his frown breaks into a grimace, and Finn falls, in apparent pain, to his knees.

“Finn!”

Luke kneels at his side, but whatever it was passes as suddenly as it came; Finn shakes his head, a terrified question in his deep brown eyes.

Luke takes his hand. It’s warm and strong, and as he helps Finn back to his feet, another image flashes through Luke’s mind. Finn, in another place, asleep--or seemingly asleep--on a bed. “What just happened?” he asks. But he’s starting to think he already knows.

They aren’t really here. Luke knows that, just like he knows he hasn't dressed like this in months, that he didn’t really fly here in an X-wing. He’s not entirely sure why the Force, or his own mind, or whatever it was, supplied those particular images. But they are images. Illusions. That’s all this is.

Luke releases Finn’s hand and presses his palm against the rough clay wall. The sleek metal lines of Finn’s childhood home have merged, now, with the rounded domes of Luke’s, and while he's never seen this living room before, the kitchen he sees through the doorway is as familiar as Aunt Beru's face in the holo he just set down—a holo that never existed in Luke's home, much less Finn's.

_ We’re creating this. Or the Force is showing it to us. But why? After all those months of searching, why was I only able to meet Finn here? _

“Finn,” he says. “I want you to try something. Close your eyes.”

Finn visibly hesitates.

“It’s not going to hurt,” Luke explains. “At least, it shouldn’t. I want to show you something, if I can.”

He holds out his hand. He’s not sure why this place has dressed him in what he was wearing on Endor, given him the glove he no longer wears.

“Hold on,” he says, and peels it off. He needs to touch Finn. Even if it isn’t a physical touch, the glove seems like a barrier within the illusion. If he’s going to figure out where Finn is, and why they needed to find each other, they need to connect, to get inside each other’s heads as much as possible.

Finn’s fingers close around Luke’s, and Luke's breath catches.

“What’s wrong?” Finn asks.

“It’s nothing.” And Luke laughs, despite the fact that it isn't really funny at all. “Your hands are warm,” he says. “That’s all.” His prosthetic can feel heat and cold, too, in a distant, rudimentary way. But it’s been a long time since this hand has felt soft, nuanced, living warmth like this. It’s a shock that he doesn’t know how to explain.

“Yeah?” Finn says. “Yours is warm, too.”

Finn smiles, and in that moment their eyes seem to lock with one another. And then, as if they’ve had the same thought, and simultaneously realized how inappropriate it is, they both look away.

“Close your eyes,” Luke says again, in an embarrassed rush, and this time Finn does. “I want you to try to follow me.”

“Follow you?” Finn asks. “Where are we going?” 

“I want to show you where I really am.”

Luke can feel Finn’s confusion, through the connection that now exists between them, but he doesn’t know that talking about things will make them seem any more like nonsense. Instead, he focuses on his physical body, on an Alliance command ship that seems an impossible distance away.

He’s not exactly sure what made today different, why he was able to connect with Finn when before, it had felt more like chasing a shooting star over parsecs and parsecs of similar, less brilliant astral bodies. Too late, he remembers that he had only meant to meditate before bed, to see if he could get a better lock on the maybe-Jedi he was looking for. He’s wearing pajamas and his hair is a mess, still damp and sticking up after a shower. Luke’s not exactly sure how many of those details Finn’s picking up on, but the same part of him that focuses a little too strongly on Finn’s touch winces inwardly at the thought of letting him in on such a private moment, so soon.

"Where are we?"

Luke hears Finn's voice less with his ears than with his mind. It echoes, distant, as if coming here has somehow placed more distance between them.

"It's an Alliance command ship," Luke explains. "We're heading to Coruscant, from the Rim."

"You're in hyperspace?"

"Yes."

"But you flew here in that X-wing."

Luke focuses again on Finn, on the house--or on the convergence of their two consciousnesses that their minds have interpreted as a house, and a hill, and an almost-empty world.

"I didn't, though," he says, as that world shifts back into focus around him. "I imagined myself there, maybe, because it's how I usually travel when I’m on my own. And you were able to see what I saw, because we're connected, somehow, in the Force. But I'm still back on that ship. I never left. And... I think you must be somewhere else, too."

Finn nods, but the expression on his face is one of disbelief, if not exactly sadness. He drops Luke's hands, and turns back to the table, full of holos that are all too blurry to make out, except for Luke's family—Anakin, Owen, Beru. "Maybe you're right," he says. "I don't know how I got here. But I also don't know where else I'd be. Who is she?" he asks abruptly, and picks up the holo of Aunt Beru.

"She's my aunt," Luke says. "She was. She... passed away."

"I'm sorry."

"It’s fine,” Luke says, although it probably never will be. Although he's wondering, now, against his will, if Finn was old enough and unlucky enough to be one of the stormtroopers who'd been there that day. He doesn't ask, though. He doesn't want to know. After all, he's killed people, too.

Instead, he picks up the holo of Anakin. “This.. this one is my father." The image is of Anakin as he appeared to Luke on Endor—an older Anakin, unburned and whole, as he never existed in the flesh. "My uncle. My sister, Leia. My best friend, Han.” The more he looks, the more of the faces start to fill themselves in, but half of them are still out of focus. “The rest of them must belong to you.”

Finn nods. “Yeah. I think so. I know some of their names, but not their faces. Rey. Poe. Poe flies an X-wing, I think. Like you.”

Luke doesn’t even know all the X-wing pilots in the Alliance anymore. They had so many new recruits after Yavin, and again after Endor. “I’m sorry,” he says, and smiles at the thought of the Damerons’ little boy—the only face that comes to mind when he hears the name  _ Poe _ . “The only Poe I know is a toddler. He won’t be flying for another decade or so.”

The hopeful expression on Finn’s face falters, and he picks up the holo of Han. “I think I know a Han, too,” he says. “Han Solo?”

Luke’s smile breaks into a full-on laugh. “One and the same,” he says. “He’ll be flattered you’ve heard of him.”

“Yeah.” Finn gives him a weak smile in return, but his voice is barely more than a whisper, and a shadow seems to fall over his face as he returns the holo to the table.

“Finn?” Luke tries to push down the flutter that rises in his stomach, tries to swallow the overwhelming urge to hold and comfort this man he barely knows. “We’ll find them,” he promises. “We’ll figure out why you’re here, and where you really are, and I’ll get in my X-wing for real and go find you.” He tries not to think too much about what happens next—about the multiple futures the Force has shown him. About the dark, faceless evil he knows Finn will have to face—maybe not now, but someday.

“I want to try to leave this place again,” Luke says. “If you’re up to it. But this time I want to find you.”

“Okay.” Finn sits on the floor, his legs folded in a typical meditative pose. “This is what you were doing, right? When you found me here.”

“Right.” Luke joins him in a cross-legged position, close enough to Finn that he can take his hands again, when it’s time. “But it doesn’t really matter what you do with your body. The important thing is to free your mind, and… and to focus on what you’re looking for. I like to sit like this. And… I think it helps to touch someone if I’m trying to connect with them, like we did earlier. But if you’d rather not…” He stumbles over the words, the awkwardness he always feels when he tries to teach something he barely understands himself, even to Leia, exacerbated a thousand times by the way being so close to Finn—who _ is  _ attractive, Luke has to admit, even though this is definitely not the time or place for those kinds of thoughts—makes him feel.

“I mean…” He clears his throat, which does absolutely nothing to smooth away his nerves. “The most important thing is to be comfortable. The specific way you sit, or stand, or whatever you want to do, doesn’t matter.”

“Okay.” Finn nods, and holds his hands out. “I know what you mean, though, about touching. I think it helps, even if we aren’t really here.”

“Right.” Luke inhales deeply, trying to focus on the Force, and on the world around him, instead of on the strength with which Finn’s hands grip his. “Now, I’m going to try to lead you through this, but I need you to open yourself up to me. Open your mind, and let me see any memories or feeling you have from before you came here. Anything that might help us figure out why we’re here.”

“You’re going to read my mind?” Finn asks the question in a joking tone, but there’s an uncertainty underneath it, too.

“Well, sort of.”

Finn’s smile fades, and Luke looks him straight in the eye. “Finn,” he says, “I need you to trust me. What I can see in your mind is… It’s what’s on the surface. If I were to attack your mind, and take things you didn’t want to show me… Well, I might be able to,” he admitted. “But to do that, I’d have to use the Dark Side of the Force.” He pushes back the memories of what happened on Endor—that feeling of being drunk with power, of looming over the edge of infinity, sure in that moment that if he jumped, he could fly.

“The Dark Side of the Force,” Finn repeats slowly, and there’s a flash of something: black and red, a mechanical voice.

_ Vader. _

It makes sense. If Finn was with the Empire, he must have seen Vader, if not in the flesh than at least in a holo somewhere. But this feels different. There’s a closeness to the mental image that doesn't seem like a dark visage viewed at a distance. And there’s something else about it. Something  _ off _ .

“You’ve felt the Dark Side,” Luke says.

Finn nods. “I don’t remember where, or how, but—“

_ Snowfall. A forest. A blaze of red light, met by a bright surge of blue. _

“That’s good.” Luke closes his eyes, tries to focus on the jumble of half-formed images. “I’m getting something. A battle in the snow…”

“Rey!”

Finn calls the name, aloud, and with it comes a rush of intense… love, maybe. Loyalty. Friendship, and the image of a young woman.

_ This is Rey. _

It's unreasonable, Luke knows, to feel this bitter sting of jealousy for someone he knows only from a half-formed vision.  _ She’s his friend _ , he tells himself.  _ She’s with him. _

The thought comes suddenly, and apparently out of nowhere, but it feels to Luke like a powerful truth.

“She’s with you,” he says. “Do you know where she is?” If they can find this Rey, Finn will be there too.

“I don’t know,” Finn says, and grips Luke's hands so tightly it almost hurts. “I don’t know,” he repeats, but the woman’s face grows brighter, and clearer, and she’s in a stark white room, kneeling at a bedside.

“It’s a hospital,” Luke says. “A medical ship?” It doesn’t look exactly like any of the ones he’s been in. But the image is unclear, except for the girl. Except for Rey. And if it’s an Imperial ship, it makes sense that it would seem at least somewhat unfamiliar.

“Finn? Have you see this ship before?”

Luke opens his eyes, but the image of the ship, of the girl, is still there, flowing into and through and between the world around them, and the other ship, where Luke is, light years away.  Sweat beads on Finn’s brow and across his nose and cheeks, and his breaths come heavy and hard.

And it  _ hurts. _

The pain rips through Luke, a rush of agony as intense as the Emperor’s lighting, focused through a bolt of flame through his back that sears the bone like when he lost his hand. It is all of the worst pain he has ever felt, combined and then magnified from Finn to Luke and back again, and for a moment it is the entire world—white and hot, a neverending void.

_ This isn’t real. _ Luke grits his teeth, which aren’t real either, and focuses on the  _ here _ and  _ now.  _ The pain, he thinks, is real, somewhere. But the laws of reality don’t have to apply.

He focuses on his body, as it exists on the Alliance ship, on the clothes he hasn’t worn since Endor, on the hand that shouldn’t exist anymore, that's somehow still catching all the warmth and the trembling and the life of Finn, until he’s shaking in Luke’s embrace, his ragged breathing not quite a cry in Luke’s ear.

“This isn’t real,” he says. “Finn, you have to focus. We're safe here.”

Luke doesn’t really know here is, but he does believe that. “Listen to me,” he says, and Finn utters a wordless cry.

“Finn?”

“Yeah.” It’s less a word than a breath. “Yeah.” Clearer now. “What is this?”

“You’re fine,” Luke says. “You’re not hurt.”

Finn’s arms, somehow, tighten around him.

“You’re fine,” he repeats. “Finn, nothing has changed.”

“I wasn’t fine,” he gasps. “In that other place. She was worried. She was crying for me.”

“You’re not in any danger.” Luke felt, somehow, that that was true too, in one sense. Finn, wherever he was, was not dying. But he also  _ was  _ in danger, from someone or something outside him. The distant darkness Luke’s seen in his visions before.

Finn takes a deep breath. Then another. Another. His arms fall to his side, and his warm brown eyes meet Luke’s at close range. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to freak out on you.”

“No, it’s okay.” There’s more Luke wants to say, but he doesn’t really know how to put it in words. He hasn’t connected with someone so easily, so instantly since he met Lando—and only with Han and Leia, before him. “I understand,” he says, although  _ understand _ is such an insufficient word. “I mean… the same kind of thing has happened to me, and I think I know how you got here.”

He’s thinking of Hoth, when he was attacked by that ice creature. When he’d somehow managed to use the Force to call his lightsaber to him, and to speak with Ben for the first time in years. He’s thinking of Bespin, when Leia somehow heard him, when he’d called out to her in the Force through his pain.

“I think you were injured,” Luke says, although what he really means is  _ Someone hurt you _ , and it terrifies him how angry that makes him feel. “And I think that somehow… put you in touch with the Force, in a more conscious way than you were.”

Finn eyes widen, wary, and Luke shakes his head. “No, it’s a good thing,” he explains. “Don’t you see? We know you’re on some kind of medical ship. There might be some kind of record. I can ask Leia to search the Alliance  _ and _ the Imperial records. What’s your last name?”

“I don’t know,” Finn says. “I don’t think I have one.” He hesitates, like there’s something else he isn’t saying. “This is my only name. I’m just Finn.”

Luke wishes he had more. A full name, or a system, or even a sector of space would make it easier to search the records. But at least he has something. It’s a start.

“I need to go back,” he says. “Just for a few hours. It’s the middle of the night where I am. I need to sleep, and eat.” At least, he assumes, Finn is being taken care of in that regard. “I’ll ask my sister to help me. And then I’ll be back.”

“Are you sure you can come back?” Finn asks. “I don’t want you to leave me here alone.”

“I’m sure,” Luke promises. “You can feel it too, right? This connection between us? The Force wanted me to find you here. And Finn? I promise it’ll bring me back.”

It's an impulse, maybe, a gut reaction, that makes Luke take Finn once more into his arms.

"I'll be back," he repeats.

"Okay," Finn says. "I trust you."

And with the warmth and the weight of that expectation on him, Luke closes his eyes. And he's home.


	3. Chapter 3

Finn’s arms close around nothing, and all he can do is breathe. In. Out. As deep as he dares, taking in the warmth of the air where Luke was.

Finn half expects him to come back immediately. Time doesn’t pass the same here; it  _ can’t  _ pass the same here, because he’s been here for hours now, and the sun is as high in the sky as when he came.

And with that thought, as if the world itself is ashamed at being caught in a lie, a shadow falls across the nearest window.

Things have changed.

The things that Luke brought with him linger, joined now with the parts of Finn’s world.  _ The connection between us. _ That’s what Luke called it. It has left the photos of his family and friends, smiling down at Finn now from the table. And there is a new face among them, now.

_ Rey. _

Finn unfolds his legs and takes the holo from the table. The base of it is cool and hard, but the smiling face of the girl in it gives Finn a sense of warmth. Of home.

His memories of her are sparse: they are in the trees, fighting the man in black, whose name is Ren, or maybe Ben? Finn is no longer sure. And there’s another memory too, something before that. Somewhere hot, somewhere bright. They are running, and Finn reaches for her, and she snaps at him not to hold her hand.

The hand that held hers, that more recently held Luke’s, curls into a fist, a vain attempt to keep some of that remembered warmth inside. Something empty within Finn aches, and another memory sweeps over him: a crying boy, in a long-ago version of his stormtrooper barracks, hugging his own knees close to his chest because there is no one else in the galaxy to hold him.

Rey is hurting now, too. Finn saw that much, in her tears at his bedside. “I’ll be back,” he promises her image in the holo, and sets it back down on the table. “I’ll be back, and I’ll bring Luke with me. And together, we’ll…” he starts to say, but he either can’t or doesn’t want to remember exactly what it is they have to do.

Luke still isn’t back. It’s been minutes, maybe, since he left, and Finn knows there’s a chance that time  _ does _ flow the same here, or that it flows slower. He might be caught waiting for years. He has to do something, then. Find out what he can. He can't let Luke come back to find him like this, crumpled and lost on the floor.

He leaves Rey’s image on the table with the others—Luke’s family, and his best friend.  _ Han. Han Solo. _ That name still pricks at something in the shadow of his memory, but the face in the image seems off somehow, and Finn’s not exactly sure why. He squints at their faces: Rey, and Han. They don't  _ not _ look alike--they both have light skin, dark hair, a slim but muscular build, but so do millions of people in the galaxy. They don't look enough alike that he's sure they're family.  _ Friend _ doesn't feel right. Or  _ lover _ . There's a connection, though. Rey and Han. Han and Rey.

Finn's head is starting to hurt, though, trying to put the pieces together. There's something else there, between these people or around them, and his mind hasn't filled in the holes. He'll ask Luke about it, about Han, when he gets back. For now, Finn needs to see what else Luke left behind.

The house has changed. The kitchen is new—or old rather, used. Finn’s generic image of what a kitchen should be is now replaced by something earthy and lived-in and real. This is Luke’s memory. It feels like him—warm and deep and stained a little sad.  _ It's the desert. Luke's from the desert, too. _ Finn isn’t sure if he had that knowledge before, or if it came to him from Luke, from the kitchen. But it feels true. Luke is from the desert. Rey is from the desert. They are alike in other ways, too.

There is food in the refrigerator now, when he opens it: bits of meat and oversized eggs and scrawny vegetables that look like they were meant to grow in soil, and that someone forced them into life in sand. There’s a jug of milk too, that looks like it must have gone off, but when Finn sniffs it it smells fresh, and good, and as long as he closes his eyes and ignores the color when he drinks it, it tastes like someone else’s childhood. Like home.

Finn washes the glass and dries it, and puts it back on the shelf where it came from. It seems unnecessary, in this world where entire rooms can change with the power of someone else’s memory, but the rhythm and the normalcy of it is a comfort. Milk still dirties; water still cleans. The rules of the world are bent here, not broken.

There is a noise, from outside. A rustle. A footstep. A breeze. Someone, or something, that wasn't there before. Finn wonders if bent rules mean it can hurt him.

"Luke?” Finn whispers the name, against whatever is lodged in his throat, although he also knows it can’t be Luke, because he can feel him--not here, still distant, like the memory of warmth on a cool summer night.

Finn keeps his footsteps as quiet as possible, back to the living room, to the door. He’s done this a thousand times before—gone to check out a noise, or anything else that seemed out of the ordinary during a patrol. But he’d had armor and a blaster and the rest of his squad at his side, then. Finn is used to going without friends or family, but he isn’t used to being alone.

He hears it again. A scratching, like something tapping a window or a wall.

_ This isn’t real. _

He knows that, but it doesn’t change anything.

Maybe he  _ could  _ change things, though. The house changed, didn’t it, because Luke knew what a kitchen should look like, because his mind filled in the faces of the holos with friends?

_ I have a blaster. _

Finn reaches for his hip, where a blaster would be, if he had one. His fingers slide into an empty holster. He lost his blaster, somewhere.

_ I didn’t _ , he tells himself.  _ It’s here. I have a blaster. _

This time, his hand finds a weapon.

It is not a blaster. Finn knows that immediately; no blaster is shaped like this, round and smooth and simple, with a single switch that his thumb instinctively finds. It is not a blaster, but it is a weapon, and Finn knows immediately that he has seen and held it before, though he can't even begin to imagine why.

It is heavier than its size would make it seem, and more polished than its age should seem to allow.  _ A lightsaber. _ His mind fills in the word, like something out of a legend.

This lightsaber isn’t Finn’s. It’s Luke’s. It’s Rey’s.

Those thoughts both feel right, even though they can’t be. Even though one weapon can’t belong to two people, Finn knows that this one somehow does.

He presses the switch, and a beam of brilliant ice-blue light hums into being. It’s the color of a memory; the sound of a song so familiar it beats like a pulse in his blood. This lightsaber isn’t his, but he knows it’s done what he needed it to do for him before, and it will be enough for whatever waits outside the door. Finn turns off the blade, but keeps it ready in his hand. “Thank you,” he whispers. To Luke, or to Rey, or to whoever’s watching over him now.

The light through the windows is dim now, at best, and when the door opens, Finn can see why. The sun is lower in the sky, which is less blue now than purple-amber, and barely visible beyond the trees.

They have grown up in an instant—trees that, in real life, would have had to have been growing here since before Finn was born. They clog the sky, pressing in upon him like the hiss of breath through a mask, and the saber in Finn’s hand arcs into life, as though it, or Finn’s hand, or the memory that drives it, has taken on a life of its own.

He steps forward, again and again, his feet marching to the unconscious rhythm drilled into them by two decades of indoctrination. His heartbeat races, faster and faster, but his legs don't have that luxury. Finn is not grateful for whoever took him from his family, but the training they gave him, at least at the moment, gives him the appearance of no fear. Within the forest, something scratches and snaps, and Finn’s hand clenches tighter around the saber. He’s not afraid. He’s not afraid. “I’m not afraid!" But putting it into shaky words makes it feel even more like a lie, and Finn wishes Luke could hear him, that he were somehow here, with that warm, calm presence that made it seem as if he always knew where to go. What to do. Who to be.

Finn’s not quite sure about the last two, but he does, at least, know where to go. He follows the sound of the scraping branches, or something deeper, some instinct that’s numbed and immobilized the common sense that tells him to run, don’t look back. Luke’s not the only one who can change this world with his memories. This forest, like the lightsaber, is here because Finn has seen it before. He’s seen it, through a cloud of fury and pain.

Something rustles again, like a wind in the trees, a branch tapping at a door or a window. Again and again, more insistent but no louder, although Finn must be closer than he was.

“I’m coming,” he mutters, under his breath. And then louder, more certain: “I’m coming!”

And as if it hears him, the forest opens. And Finn almost laughs at what he sees.

It’s the X-wing. The impossible X-wing, that even Luke says he didn’t really fly here. The trees have grown up around it, and the branches bend and tremble, tapping against the cockpit glass in a wind that blows nowhere else but here. The ladder is still at its side, though vines tie it to the ground now, and it occurs to Finn for the first time that it isn’t a part of the ship. It’s the kind of ladder you’d see in a hangar, and shouldn’t really be here at all.

None of this is here, of course. But  _ not here _ isn’t the same as  _ not real _ .

“Luke?” Finn doesn’t expect an answer, and doesn’t get one. But the wind stops. The branches still, and the path to the cockpit is clear.

Finn climbs. The ladder’s more rickety than it looks; it shakes with each step up he takes. And when he reaches the top, the cockpit swings open.

It’s an invasion of privacy. Finn knows that, somewhere deep in the recesses of his brain. There’s no such thing as privacy in the First Order, not unless you’re higher up than anyone Finn knows will ever be. But Luke isn’t a stormtrooper. He’s just a normal person. The kind of person who grew up in a warm, sandy kitchen with milk in the fridge, who has a best friend and a sister and probably, somewhere, a home—that’s only his, or maybe his and his partner’s. This ship is his space too, and Finn knows galactic manners probably say he shouldn’t barge in. 

But this isn’t real. And maybe it’s just Finn’s way of convincing himself that it’s okay to trespass, but it seems like Luke—or the Force, at least, or  _ someone _ , wanted him to find his way here.

He climbs into the cockpit. There is something familiar about this, about the act of climbing into a fighter like this, even though Finn is sure he’s never flown an X-wing, that he’s never flown anything before.

The cockpit is neat, well-cared for, and the few possessions that are visible to Finn aren’t anything that seem like they’d be private. He finds finds a pair of flight gloves—two of them this time, cracked and worn, but clean—and a little box of tools and fuses that probably go with the ship.

There’s nothing here to say this ship belongs to Luke, instead of any other pilot. It feels like Luke, though, like a lingering scent in the air. The worn pilot’s seat wraps around Finn like Luke’s arms, and for the first time since coming here, he thinks he could sleep.

He thinks he  _ will _ sleep, whether he wants to or not. Exhaustion sweeps over him, weighty and warm. The air is heavy. His bones are heavy, the blood that he hears in his ears thick and slow. It is a fatigue that seems to slow the whole world, and as Finn leans his head back, into the indentation meant for Luke’s, he hears a voice he doesn’t know.

_ Use the Force. _

He is speeding down a canyon made of blaster fire and steel, streaming over a flawless snowscape, plummeting down through the clouds toward must and muck. The images rush at him like the glow of hyperspace—too fast for Finn to catch most of them as anything more than images underscored with fear and joy. It is a young and reckless feeling, and one that Finn doesn’t quite understand. He’s not a pilot, but Luke is, and through Luke—or through his ship’s memories, anyway—he sees the beauty alongside his fear. The beauty of risking your life for the people you love. Of fighting for your place in the stars.

Finn closes his eyes and wraps his hand around the joystick. He hasn’t done this before. He isn’t doing it now, not really. The X-wing is still grounded, and he knows if he opens his eyes, he will see nothing but the trees and the setting sun. But he also sees that canyon—a metal canyon, out in space. Lines of blaster fire streaking around him.

Luke’s voice in his mind.

_ Han. _

Finn sees another ship, then, in another memory that he thinks might be one of his own. This isn’t a fighter; it’s some kind of cargo ship, and he sees himself running from the cockpit to a rickety old gun well. The ship is falling apart, and Rey is holding it together. Rey, and Han Solo.

_ Han! _

Luke’s voice again, rising in joy and then panic, a hundred thousand different times. Luke, in the gun well where Finn had been moments earlier, laughing as he swings the same cannon from side to side.

Then Finn is somewhere else. Another ship. A larger ship, or maybe some kind of space station.  _ Luke. _ He hears a different voice now—an old voice, a tired one. It speaks Luke’s name with a faded love that can barely be heard beneath its sorrow.

And then:  _ Ben! _

It is Han Solo’s voice, calling someone he has lost. Finn’s hand falls to the lightsaber.  _ I should have done something. Should have saved him. _

But there is nothing he can do, because the memory has already happened. The man in the mask has come, and killed, and gone.

And just as before, Finn can do nothing but watch as Kylo Ren—he remembers the full name now—drives a different lightsaber through Han Solo’s body, and then stands there and lets him fall.

Finn is screaming now, screaming, in the vision and in life, and in the vision other voices join in too. Rey, and an alien who roars in wordless horror—and a woman, whose scream he feels somehow, even though it is silent. Even though she is far away.

Finn still doesn’t know who Han Solo is to Rey, to the alien, to Kylo Ren. But he knows he is dead. And that, together with the lightsaber, is one of the reasons he—he and Rey—had to find Luke. Han Solo is dead, and somehow, even with all his strength in the Force, the legendary Jedi Luke Skywalker doesn’t know.

“Luke.” Finn gasps the name through gritted teeth. “Luke, I need to talk to you.” He forces his heavy eyelids open—oh,  _ Force _ , he is tired—and the trees are gone, replaced by the starry sky above the cockpit.

He doesn’t know how to open it, how to get out of the ship. Luke’s memories of flying are gone, and the controls are little more than a maze of identical-seeming buttons. It takes more strength than Finn’s ever spent on anything just to reach up through the thick and sluggish air, and the switch he finally manages to press only turns on a light that means as little to him as everything else.

“Luke,” he says again. “Luke Skywalker.” Luke never gave Finn his last name. But he has it now, and it feels like something weighty and old and important. The kind of name he shouldn’t have forgotten. The kind of name everyone knows. “Who are you?” Finn asks, and tries another useless button, and the effort of it sends a bead of sweat trickling down his brow.

This isn’t right. It shouldn’t take so much effort to  _ move _ , not when his body isn’t even here. Finn lets his arm fall back to his side, to the lightsaber he and Rey somehow have, that Luke somehow doesn’t, and should

_ It helps to touch someone... to connect with them. _

That did help, but Luke isn’t here. It’s silly, Finn knows, to ache so badly at the absence of someone he’s barely met— _ never _ met, if by met you mean in the flesh. But there was something about Luke’s touch, about the closeness that came so naturally, given so freely. About the way he made the Force seem so rich and alive. So intimate, where it had seemed so vast and terrifying before.

Luke isn’t here. But Finn has the lightsaber, that  _ is  _ Luke’s even if it’s somehow also Rey’s. He has the ship, that runs deep with the sadness and the fear and the thrill of desperate flight that also runs like the Force through Luke’s veins. Finn can touch these things, even if he can’t touch Luke, and he closes his eyes and pours his focus and his  _ self  _ into his hands, into the things they hold: the joystick and the saber.

He thinks of Luke. He breathes.

And then he is there, in Luke’s room on the command ship—an invasion of privacy far deeper than a half-imagined X-wing in a dream. Luke sleeps, a different lightsaber on a table at his bedside, as vulnerable as a powerful Jedi can be. His body is wrapped in a pile of blankets, his face half hidden in between a pillow and a mess of sandy hair. He turns, with a mumble that sounds almost but not quite like a word, and Finn’s breath catches at the peace that blurs Luke's features into agelessness, without the worries of the waking world to weigh upon them.

He is beautiful.

He seems too young to be a legend, although Finn’s faulty memories tell him that is, nevertheless, what Luke Skywalker is. He seems too kind to be a warrior, to unsure of himself to be a master. He twists again, buried hands pulling the blankets close around him, and mutters, “Ben, please.”

Ben. It is that name again, the one Han Solo cried before he was killed. Who is Ben, and how is he connected to the others—to Han, to Luke, to Rey, to Kylo Ren?

“Luke?" Finn tries again. "You have to wake up. I remembered something. What we have to do.” He isn’t really sure how this works, so he says the words aloud, and also  _ thinks _ them, so hard they start to hurt, too.

Finn knows, too well, how fleeting the peace of sleep is, and his instinct is to want to protect Luke, not to hurt him. But Solo is Luke's friend; he deserves to know what Finn does. And Finn needs Luke's help to stand against the First Order. To help Rey. And maybe he needs Luke for something else too... for something he doesn't want to think too hard about. How can he even know when he's felt a connection, when he's lived his life up to now alone?

“Luke,” he says again, and his voice shakes in the confines of the X-wing. He shouldn’t feel this way, maybe, shouldn’t care so deeply about someone he barely even knows.

But they are alike, Finn and Luke: both blessed and haunted with the Force. Both thrown into wars they never wanted or needed. Both tied to friends they must do anything—anything!—to protect. Finn loves Rey, and Poe, and he has—had—an admiration and respect for Han Solo. But there is something different about Luke, that Finn can't explain or ignore.

“Luke. Wake up. I know what I have to tell you.” Finn closes his eyes, and grits his teeth, and tries so hard not to imagine Luke’s grief that he ends up focusing on it too much, and it drowns him, pulls him down into his fatigue.

“He’s dead,” Finn says, the words as heavy as he universe. “Han Solo’s dead, and I was there.”

Luke doesn’t wake. His eyes don’t open, but he thrashes against the blankets, and his peaceful features twist in a grimace of pain. “Han,” he gasps. “Han! Han, no…”

Finn was raised to be emotionless. But the First Order failed. The fear and the grief emanating from Luke are eclipsed only by Finn’s own. And when he breaks the connection because he can take it no more, and sinks back into the pilot’s seat of the X-wing with a pseudo-body too exhausted now to even sit upright, he is not sure whether the tears in his eyes sting with regret that he’s hurt Luke, or with fear that, now that he’s done it, Luke won’t come back. That what he thought he felt between them was only imagined. That no one will ever come for him here, and he’ll be left alone, unable to do anything to stop the darkness that he, as a part of the First Order, helped to bring.


	4. Chapter 4

Luke wakes to a throbbing headache, and the fading strands of a sickening dream. If he didn't know better, he'd say he felt hungover--never mind that he hasn't had anything to drink for too many days and weeks to count. But it feels the same--the feeling of having slept, without having rested. The half-memories that may or may not be real. The knowledge that  _ something _ has gone wrong, without an understanding of what it was.

Finn.

That memory is real, at least, even if it's also colored a little like the dreams and visions that swirl and butt against each other in Luke's heavy head. 

_ Han. _

That was the dream. Finn was there, and so was the girl, Rey, but it was really about Han. Something terrible, dark… but Han is  _ there _ , where he always is, at the edges of Luke’s awareness. He and Chewie are waiting for Luke and Leia and the others on Coruscant, and there is no sense of danger about him in the here and now.

Luke gropes for the chrono, sure it must be the middle of ship’s night but hoping it's late enough to wake Leia, to tell her he's finally found the Jedi—well, one of the Jedi—he's been sensing, and to ask if there's anything she can do to help Luke find him, now, for real.

When he sees the time, though, he sits up so suddenly that a jolt of pain rips through his skull from ear to ear.

Luke fights to keep the scream that wants to burst out from inside him to a moan. It's too easy to hear things in the ship's close quarters, and he's pretty sure that staying up too late mediating—or talking to an ex-stormtrooper via the Force—isn't something that most of his friends are going to be sympathetic to. Even Leia… Luke shakes his head. She’s having trouble dealing with the fact that Darth Vader was her father. But Luke did too, at first, and if she’s reluctant to delve too deeply into the Force for herself, she’s never refused to help him. Luke believes it because he has to: she’ll do what she can.

He grimaces a little, head still throbbing, as he shrugs out of his clothes and pulls on a fresh set of fatigues. But if growing up on Tatooine, where there was pretty much nothing to do after sunsdown but drink too much and sleep too little in Biggs Darklighter's garage, Luke got pretty good at showing up to work the next morning with a pounding headache and a facial expression that gave exactly none of what he'd been doing away.

Leia isn’t in her quarters, which shouldn’t be surprising, as close as it is to ship’s noon. Luke follows her presence to a briefing room where, despite the name, Leia is working, alone. “Leia?” he calls through the door, even though he knows she can feel him here, too. “Do you mind if I come in?”

Instead of answering, she opens the door on a room full of scattered data tapes and flickering consoles. She is glowing, both with the light of the new life growing within her and with the excitement of fulfilling her life’s work—the new Republic whose framework she is assembling. “Luke.” She beams, and her smile glows brighter even as her aura of joy flickers, fades. “You weren’t at breakfast. We were worried about you.”

“I overslept.” He smiles an apology, and rests his hands—flesh and metal—on the swell of her belly. “How’s my nephew?” he asks, but he already knows the answer. The baby kicks, sending a ripple of love and energy through the Force that almost, but not quite, pushes his mother’s discomfort away.

It’s almost nothing—a shying away, through the Force, that her politician’s veneer won’t let the naked eye see. And after all these months, it’s nothing Luke needs to comment on. She dislikes the bare metal of his new prosthetic hand for the same reason Luke needed it—the constant reminder of who their father was, where they came from, and what they have, every day, to love and to fear.

It is a reminder, too, of Bespin, and Han, and the strange, angry darkness left by his dream. This feels different than it did then, though. When Luke left Dagobah for Bespin, he’d been so certain that Han and Leia were in danger. Now, it’s more the same feeling of unease he thinks everyone must feel about their loved ones—not that Han is in danger now, but that the many possible tangled pathways of the future mean, of course, that he may be in danger someday again.

“He’s fine.” Leia answers Luke’s question about the baby. “Moving around so much these days. He’s going to be a handful.” It’s not a complaint, though. Misgivings about passing along Vader’s DNA aside, Luke has never seen her so happy. And for the first time, maybe, since Han and Leia realized their feelings for each other, Luke thinks he might be able to be completely happy for them, too.

“Have you heard from Han?”

Leia frowns a little. “He’s on Coruscant, with Chewie.” Her eyes focus on something distant; politician or not, she’s still getting used to her abilities with the Force, and her effort to reach out to Han shows. “He’s fine,” she says, but it sounds like a question. “Why? Is something wrong?”

“No.” Luke shakes his head, but he can’t really lie to her. “It’s nothing, really. Not a vision, just… a bad dream.”

Leia sighs. This, too, is a tired refrain, a little strain between the two of them that sometimes feels pulled to the breaking point. “We’d both know if anything happened to him.” She picks up a datapad, makes a point of redirecting her attention to whatever information it contains. “Visions aren’t always reliable, Luke. Following them has gotten you into trouble before.”

“You’re right,” he says, even though he doesn’t really think so. They were all hurt on Bespin, in one way or another, but without the knowledge he’d gained there, he wouldn’t have been able to save his father. It was what he needed to do, in the end. This, too, is an argument they’ve had a hundred times before, though. Leia can have this one. Han is fine, after all; finding Finn takes priority right now.

Leia puts the datapad aside and gives Luke a tired smile. “You’re exhausted,” she says. “No wonder you’re having bad dreams. Maybe you should take a break, once we’re back on solid ground.”

“I’d love to.” Luke shakes his head. “But I don’t know if I can. I didn’t actually come here to ask you about Han. I came to ask for your help, Leia. I… I think I’ve found one of the Jedi I’ve been looking for.”

“From your visions again?” Leia frowns. “Luke, I thought the Jedi were…”  _ Dead. Extinct. _

“He’s not a Jedi yet,” Luke explains, “but he will be. Or he could be, at least, as long as he’s trained. He’s amazing, Leia. He’s…”

Leia laughs, a wonderful, free, and silver sound that Luke doesn't hear nearly often enough.

“What’s so funny?” But he’s starting to laugh too.

“If I didn’t know better,” she says, “I’d say you were talking about a potential date, and not a potential student. Is it someone in the fleet?”

“No,” Luke says, and he’s trying to ignore the way his throat goes tight, the way he can  _ feel  _ his face start to redden as he looks away, pretending to be entranced by the star map filling a console on the far wall. “That’s the thing, Leia. That’s what I need your help with. I’m not… I’m not quite sure where he is.”

“So you want me to search Imperial hospital records for someone named Finn?” she says, when he’s told her everything he can remember. Her eyes are wide, and she shakes her head a little when she says it. Luke knows it sounds ridiculous, but unless Finn remembers where he is in more detail, it’s the only thing he can think of to try.

“I need you to help me  _ find _ him, Leia. You remember how I called to you on Bespin.” He curls his metal hand into a fist, and even though Leia’s trying not to stare at it, she does, for just a little longer than would have been subtle, and nods.

“That’s what’s happening here,” Luke says. “We both need to find each other. He’s hurt, and he needs someone to teach him, and I…”  _ I need someone who won’t look at me that way, when I talk about my father, about my visions. _ He can’t say that, though, so he tries the next best thing. “I need a student who’s willing and eager to learn.”

Leia looks down at the table. “Luke, it isn’t like that. With all of this”—she gestures broadly at the table—“and the baby, I just don’t have time for anything else right now.”

She’s lying, of course, and Luke can’t even fault her for it. It took him months to come to terms with the fact that Vader was his father, and that was after he’d already had years to get used to the idea  of learning to use the Force. The baby is a part of it, too—not the pregnancy itself, but Luke’s enthusiastic insistence, as soon as he’d felt the strength of the life within her, that Han and Leia’s son be trained as a Jedi. Luke isn’t totally without fault either; he should have known it would be too soon. So he doesn’t tell her about the connection he feels, between the baby and the coming darkness. There will be time for that once Leia has made her peace with where she came from. For now, Luke needs to make sure that when the darkness comes, he isn’t standing alone on the side of light.

“All I need is a search of the records,” he says. “You can get Artoo to help you. Please, Leia. You’re the only one with the right clearance I can trust with this.”

“You don’t even know his full name?” Leia frowns, but the hardness around her eyes has started to soften. “There must be a million Finns in the galaxy.”

“I know,” Luke says. “But I have to try. I keep seeing them—the three of them. I told you. The one who longs for the darkness. The one who walks in shades of grey. And the one who embraces the light. That’s Finn. He’s the one I have to find.”

She rests a hand on his shoulder. “Luke, you tell me all the time that visions are just that—visions. They might be symbolic, or they might be a possible future that never comes to be. You’ve said yourself that there are thousands of people with the potential to become Jedi.”

“Potential, yes. But not like him. He’s the one I’ve been seeing, Leia. I know it.”

Leia nods, but she lowers her hand to her belly, where another little pulse of light magnifies her uncertainty. “Okay,” she says. “I can’t promise I’ll find anything, and I  _ do _ think you should take some time off. But as long as it doesn’t interfere with”—she glances down—“anything, I’ll see what I can do.”

***

Luke feels no more rested after a rushed mess-hall meal than he did that morning; he can hear his own heartbeat, feel every twinge of muscles that haven’t been doing anything strenuous. Every instinct he has, when he gets back to his quarters, tells him to crawl back into bed and not wake up until they arrive at Coruscant. But first, he needs to talk to Finn.

Luke switches his comlink off—if Leia finds something, he’ll know—and crosses his legs in a meditative position on the floor. And he reaches out, along a convoluted path that feels familiar now. It’s like slipping  _ through _ places, in a direction that’s not quite up and down or side to side—like jumping into hyperspace, to a place he doesn’t quite understand, but that still feels a little like home.

Leia’s half-joking words resonate in his mind:  _ a potential date, and not a potential student. _

A potential date. Luke has never been on a date, although that isn’t exactly something he wants to admit to Leia, or to anyone. Kissing Biggs in a landspeeder outside Tosche Station doesn’t count, and neither does his three-year-long, only possibly requited, crush on Han. At some point, he started to assume, at some level, that he’d never have what Han and Leia found in each other.

That isn’t likely to change now. He knows that. Finn is attractive, and one of only a handful of people in the galaxy who might truly be able to understand him. But that doesn’t mean he’s available, much less interested, and it doesn’t change the fact that they’ve never even met in the flesh.

Still. Luke is looking forward to seeing Finn again. And he has to admit, it feels a little like the way, every time he went into Anchorhead, he always kind of hoped to run into Biggs.

“Finn?”

The world ripples into being around him. It is morning here, now. The sky is grey with the efforts of the sun to push back the last shades of the night, and the grass beneath Luke’s feet shimmers with a veil of dew. It is beautiful, and he wonders if it came from his memories or Finn’s, or a combination, maybe, of every sunrise either of them has ever seen.

Luke is outside, in front of the house, dressed this time in the fatigues he’s really wearing, with his lightsaber clipped to his belt, even though it’s lying on his bed in the real world. And he wants nothing more than to go inside, to tell Finn that Leia’s agreed to help them, and to start trying to figure out how to train someone as a Jedi when neither the student nor the teacher is physically here.

But Finn isn’t in the house, and his presence casts a different kind of grey over the dawn.

“Finn?” It feels like waking up from a bad dream. Like waking up from Luke’s bad dream, about something terrible happening to Han.

“Finn?” Luke calls again, and starts running. He is less tired here, and the Force guides his feet as fast as his mind can bear to imagine. The world swims before his eyes in layers—the quasi-physical realm of grass and sky and trees that he could swear weren’t there before, and over it all a less corporeal but no less visible road map of fear and guilt and grief.

_ The dream _ .

Finn was there. Finn saw the dream too, whether as a dream or as an illusion or as reality. And Finn doesn't know yet that none of it was real. He thinks Han died before his eyes, while he was helpless to stop it.

Luke sees him, then, through the trees, unmistakably Finn by the way he moves, although he, too, is dressed differently. He wears a brown jacket that somehow accentuates rather than hides his muscular arms, and his steady pace as he runs through the forest is one of someone trying to train, not to flee.

Luke adjusts his pace, catching up with Finn and then falling into place beside him. Their feet hit the ground in a steady, synchronized rhythm, and Luke’s breath grows heavy, matching Finn’s. Finn glances over and gives him a nod—a silent acknowledgment, and also an invitation to join him on this… whatever this is.

And they run. They run until sweat plasters Luke’s hair to his forehead, until he starts to wish he’d imagined himself wearing boots that were better broken in. They run until they reach the impossible X-wing, in a clearing Luke knows he didn’t land in, and Finn slows to a stop, his hands on his knees and his breaths coming fast and hard.

“You came back.” Finn looks up, meets Luke’s eyes, and then looks back at the ground.

“Of course I came back,” Luke says. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because I couldn’t save your friend.” Finn shakes his head—trying, Luke thinks, to hide the frown that seems to shatter his features—and crosses the clearing, to where he’s laid out a towel, a canteen, and a collection of other things that must have come from the X-wing, because they’re Luke’s. He picks up the towel, about to mop the sweat from his face and neck—and then stops, and holds it out to Luke instead.

“I’m fine,” Luke says, but sweat stings his eyes. He wipes them with the bottom of his sleeve.

“It’s not real.” Finn looks at the towel, then back to Luke. “But it feels better to act like it is.” He wipes his face, then, careful to use only one end of the towel, and then jogs over to Luke and extends the clean end.

“Thanks.” Luke smiles. It does feel good, to wipe the sweat from his skin and to take a drink from the proffered canteen. “Finn. I know what you saw. But Han’s fine. I can feel him. It was only a dream.”

_ Dream _ isn’t quite the right word, but  _ vision _ feels too serious, too.

“He’s fine,” Luke repeats, when Finn shakes his head, wary. “He’s on Coruscant. We’ll be there tomorrow, and I’ll be able to see him.”

Finn shakes his head. “I saw him die. Kylo Ren—that’s the man in the mask—“

“Kylo Ren?” Luke repeats the name. He’s never heard it before, but he files it away in his memory as one more thing to ask Leia to look for. He hasn’t heard of any other Force users in the Empire. But it’s possible, at least, that the Emperor had a spare apprentice or two set aside.

“He was… important, I think. Not my commander. But somebody… maybe above her. I wish I could remember.” He sinks to a tree stump that seems to have been placed there exactly for that purpose, and buries his face in his hands.

“Finn.” Luke kneels beside him, ignoring the dew seeping through the knees of his fatigues. He hesitates, just for a second, before putting his hand—flesh and blood again, somehow—on the broad expanse of Finn’s back. He’s warm. They’re both warm, from the sun and from running and from a  _ life _ they shouldn’t feel if this was really just a vision. “You’ve remembered so much already,” Luke says. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. It’ll come.”

“I just feel like… like I let her down. Rey. That I’m letting you down now.”

“You’re not letting me down. Finn? Look at me.” He does. Luke smiles, and Finn smiles back, and even though it’s forced, it makes Luke’s heart swell, and his smile widen. “I talked to Leia,” he says. “My sister. She’s got the highest level of clearance in the Alliance. If you’re in any of the records we recovered, she’ll find you. I’ll find you. And until then, I want to try to train you. I’m not sure how much we can do, here—“

“Wait.” Finn stands up, abruptly, and Luke’s first instinct is to think he’s done something wrong.

“I’ve got to show you something,” Finn says. “I mean, what we can do here. We can change this place, make things that weren’t there. The house changed, when you were there, and this stuff.” He gestures to the things he must have taken from the X-wing. “And I did it too. This jacket? All I had to do was remember my friend Poe gave it to me, and bam! I’m wearing it. And this.”

He reaches for his belt, where a blaster ought to be, and unclips a silver cylinder. A lightsaber.

“How did you…” Luke starts to say, but the words dry up in his mouth.

Finn holds out his hand. His hand, holding the one thing in the universe that Luke never expected to see again.

“It’s yours,” Finn says. “I don’t know how I know that, but I do.”

Luke shakes his head, and takes a step back, but he’s already reaching for it, taking it with mechanical fingers that ache with an old remembered pain.

“I don’t understand,” he says. “What is this? Finn… who are you?”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much for reading this far! This is a work in progress, and especially since it's SUCH a rare pair, I really appreciate any feedback you have to give! (Concrit is also welcome!)
> 
> Also please check me out on Tumblr for more Luke, Finn, and Star Wars content: staringatthetwinsuns.tumblr.com


End file.
